Also, we need to be careful about what URGE2 is. It's a key agenda item, not a summation of what environmentalism is about. So to draw an analogy to the religious right, it's parallel to "stop gay sex," not "run society based on the Bible." Otherwise we risk falling into an energy-reductionist conceptualization of environmentalism.

The four points are excellent - miles ahead of the current conversation among environmentalists.

One problem. How to power civilization if "coal is the enemy of civilization", oil isn't much better, and nuclear and ethanol have their own issues?  

The efficiency and technological innovation touted by Amory Lovins can only take us so far.

Ultimately we will have to undergo a "culture change" - to develop new expectations about how we live and what is a satisfying life.  Cars, consumerism and air travel just aren't sustainable.  Daniel Quinn presents the idea of culture change to a popular audience. For me, Donella Meadows (co-author of Limits to Growth) made the best argument in Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System (PDF).

Kinda hard to get this idea on a 3-by-5 card though.

-Bart

Bart
Energy Bulletin

I have had elevator moments with Sen. Alan Cranston, Sen. Warren Magnuson, Sen. Henry Jackson (Scoop), presidents, congressmen, DOE officials, news reporters. Cranston told me he must pass bills for large corporations so he can remain in office to give lip service to environmental causes.

Ignorance is not the problem.  Education is not what you need to deliver in an elevator.  They know the issues.  Deliver passion.

Coal does not cause global warming, humans cause global warming with coal.  The root cause is greed and corruption.  

Mismatches between power-supply and power-demand can also be resolved with resistor banks (power soaks; shunts).
google.com/search?q=power+station+shunts+resistor

In the winter, excess power can be routed to resisters under roadways, to heat those roadways so they do not collect snow and ice.

If the roadways do not collect snow and ice, there are direct savings from not salting; and there are indirect savings from not salt-damaging roads, bridges, cars, agricultural land and aquifiers.

A pure electric plugin vehicle would get the highest tax credit, a standard hybrid the lowest, regular gas guzzlers no credit at all.  Solar and wind systems would be credited by how many kwh they generate.  Conservation devices like geothermal heating/cooling systems by how much CO2 or kwh they save.

Long term tax policies that we can all count on for about 10 years.  Then sunset all subdsidies, because they won't be needed by then.  As mass production takes hold, costs will come down and the early adopters will have payed for their solar panels, plugin hybrids, and biogas systems in energy savings and actual income.

The actual income part comes from reforming utility regulation like the Engineer pointed out is happening in your state and others.  Paying for renewable distributed generation and storage so customers will invest in it.

Great bumpersticker, "URGE2"!!  I'll borrow some of your language for referendum writing.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

It might take a few thousand emails.  So email often and early.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

Also, is there a reason your URGE2 concept fails to mention renewable sources of energy?

Conservation land sequesters CO2 and so does organic ag soil.  This whole renewable energy, serial plugin hybrid transportation, energy conservation plan fits with organic farming and expansion of conservation land.

Fuel farming using chemical agriculture destroys the cO2 sequetration capability of soil.  And turns conservation land back into farmland.

Conservation land on the northern prairies makes  good wind farm sites.  Only 4000 square miles of restored prairie (a park the equivalent size of a square 70 miles on a side)would sequester all US cO2 emissions.  (1.8 tons of cO2 stored per acre per year according to a Minnesota university research study of prairie grass ecosystem.)

4000 50mw wind machines (one per square mile) would produce 1/3 of US electric power needs.

Organic farmland might only sequester half that amount, but look at the huge farm acreage.  that's a huge effect on CO2 levels and a huge area to locate more wind machines.  Farming wind and other crops is compatable.

Turning farming organic will necessitate biodigestors to process manure and other farm waste into organic fertilizer.  That produces biogas that can provide backup generation for wind and solar power.  Biogas used in fuel cell/turbines at 75% efficiency.

Farms can go organic and sell clean electricity and even sell biodiesel grown in solar collector algae systems that use the cO2 from the fuel cell biogas.

Pay farmers instead of exxonmob and OPEC for energy.  Why not?  And think of all the wildlife on conservation land and organic farms.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

4000 50mw wind machines (one per square mile) would produce 1/3 of US electric power needs.

The largest currently available wind turbine is 3.6 MW (Siemens & GE) with a swept area diameter of approximately 320' (I'm assuming that even if larger units become available, they will scale proportionately).  Wake turbulance effects require a lateral separation of roughly 4 blade diameters and an inline separation of 14 diameters.

Assuming 1/2 of those separation distances from the edges of your 70 mile square, I come up with 231 turbines across the width of the site and 82 for the depth, for approximately 18,942 turbines for roughly 68,190 MW of capacity (instead of 200,000 for the 4,000 50 MW units).  Based on current construction costs, ballpark would be $170 billion.

The Energy Information Administration lists 978,020 MW as the 2005 U.S. generating capacity, so it would be just under 7%.

That being said, from what I've read, the midwest usually sees around a 40% capacity factor for wind projects, about 10% higher than what is considered the minimum for a commercial project and combining it with a sequestration project is a good concept.

Common sense is an oxymoron...

We need really big machines to get higher into the faster, steadier winds.  As you probably already know the power in the wind increases with the cube of wind speed.  Twice the speed, 8 times the power.  Wind speed increases rapidly with height above the ground.  And the 1000 foot machines would produce aproximately 9 times the power of the GE machine.

I had been using the average separation figure of 7 diameters.  Say 4 diameters laterally and 10 inline.  But no matter.  It's merely an example.  Plenty of additional space is available to put these machines further apart.  I could see a Prairie National Park of 3 times that 4000 square mile area fitting easily in North and South Dakota, Montana, and neighboring states.  

I had been using the old figure of 600,000 mw US generating capacity too.  that must be from 1990?

But I DO stand corrected.  Good points as usual.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

The 1.3 MW units used for the wind project we're involved in (the third phase just completed its bond sale and will use 2.3 MW Siemens turbines) had a generator unit that weighed 53 tons and were lifted onto the 200' towers by a large crane.  With 100' blades, the blade/hub assembly weighed 12 tons.  Trying to lift even 4 times as much weight to a height of 1,000 feet could be a challenge!

The rotating mass (without significantly lighter/stronger materials) might affect the low end of the power curve (IE, how much wind is required before the blades will begin to turn).  And, the generator would need to operate at a much lower RPM or the blade tip speed would become extremely high.

We have experienced a large number of main gear and bearing failures with the 1.3 MW units, longer blades will provide a larger moment arm which will cause even greater stress.

It could be interesting to install one taller tower in a project and see how much the capacity factor improved just by raising an existing technology turbine into a better wind regime.

The separation figures I used came from the inital assessment study for the most recent wind project we're involved in.  Given the visual appearance of most wind projects I've seen, it must be fairly applicable to any site.

Common sense is an oxymoron...

Yep, conventional designs would be hard to do on this scale.

"a generator unit that weighed 53 tons and were lifted onto the 200' towers by a large crane."

The generators would need to be on the ground in the larger scale machines.

"(without significantly lighter/stronger materials)"

I have a design that might solve that problem too, call my venture capitalist!  It's a horizontal rather than vertical axis machine.

I have been searching for a resource that gives wind speed and variability at higher levels, but so far no luck.  I guess it's hard to moniter?

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

Hmmm...

Possible with the vertical (I think you were dyslexic on the orientations...) axis machine you are proposing.  The swept area would be smaller as well which could up your turbine count.

I know early on both types of turbines were being installed, but every installation I've heard on in the last few years have been horizontal axis.

"I have been searching for a resource that gives wind speed and variability at higher levels, but so far no luck.  I guess it's hard to monitor?"

It's pretty site specific.  Typically they install a meteorological tower with monitoring equipment at the level they want data for.  That would be difficult to do at 1000'.  More recently I've heard of using SODAR to monitor wind data, but this still involves installing equipment at the specific monitoring site.

If there is an airport near your location, they may have wind data available at various heights from wind shear monitoring.  That may at least give you an approximation.

Your concept could also touch on the 'monocrop' issue brought up in the ethanol threads, if at least a portion of the areas leased for wind turbines were required to use sequestration crops.
 

Common sense is an oxymoron...

I meant vertical axis. The swept area would be more like a truncated triangle in the design I have in mind.  It depends on wind speed gradient as elevation goes up.

I wondered if they used something like the radar that's used to detect microbursts to moniter wind speed at higher elevations.  I'll check that link, thanks.

The data  I saw was from a 10 year  Minnesota university study, it said that 1.8 tons of cO2 per acre per year is stored by natural prairie grass.  Beating farmed crops.  No problem there.

That whole idea of saving the prairie ecosystem and establishing a huge new park, 100 years or so after Teddy R. did his park starting all seems to fit well together.

TR the big oil trust buster, conservationist.  Our oil monopoly war and climate problems solved by a new national park that helps make monopolized oil unecessary.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

This reminds me.  Why not use kites or baloons to measure these higher winds rather than towers?  Good amateur technique for experimenting.

 SODAR is the industrial soltion though.  You could survey a lot of sites quickly.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

It is known that there is higher wind speeds at higher altitudes as a general rule, but there are often times horizontal differences in speed and sometimes even direction.

Expanding the diameter does noting to increase the wind speed at the prior lower levels of altitude. All that is accomplished is that you have increased the differential wind force across the swept area, increasing shear forces on the props and the crankshaft.

Only the portion sticking up above the prior height may receive the benefit of any increase in wind at that portion of height -- the rest of the swept area is same as it ever was. The now greatly elongated props are stressed by more self-weight and more frequent fatigue oscillating between higher and lower wind strata than before.

This kind of chronic repetitive material fatigue is especially deadly to carbon-fibers, and yet more expensive substitutes must be used with corresponding increased mass and inertial factors.

The ripple effect cascades to greater shear forces on the crankshaft and hub connectors. Increased mass and inertia on the crankshaft loses some fraction of the gains in wind, and the gains in wind only benefit the new height portion while the old height portion suffers from increased mass.

You need to start with a clean sheet of paper and apply Newton's laws of action-reaction.

http://h2-pv.us/wind/Introduction_01.html

Properly designed you can make 100 MW, 500 MW, 1,000 MW towers. Because they are multiple small generators, one story at a time, you can have AC generation for grid supply and DC generation for electrolysis in the same tower at the same time.

Because of the tower design there are no exposed moving parts, thus the name is Eagle's Roost to indicate that birds can nest on them.

There are no mass penalties for increasing the height. The top generator is built like the lowest level generator. There are no blade-throw or ice-throw hazards, so they can be additions on top of tall buildings in cities.

Because the actual mass is reduced without gears, without crankshafts, and the wind collectors are inside out of the worst ravages of weather, the windcatchers themselves can be much more delicate and light. Thus they come on in much lower windspeeds.

http:ecosyn.us PALACES for the People, H2-PV, PV-Breeders acres of PV, tons of Hydrogen

It would use roller furling sails instead of blades.  Kind of like the old tall sailing ships, but controllable from the ground with computer controls, no sailors aloft to furl the sails.

I think it would be the least expensive design per kwh of any other I've seen.  

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin